Video: 10 Years of Fires on Earth Seen From Space | Hacker News Reader

Video: 10 Years of Fires on Earth Seen From Space

wired.com

That's pretty sweet. The spread of the greenery in the summer, followed by its retreat in the winter, makes it look like the earth is breathing.

It would be great if the underlying color images are available for download.

That's a large swathe of fires in the northern sub Sahara every December. Any explanation for this ? I found the page below which shows a picture month by month

http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003800/a003870/index.h...

edit: found it at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/fires/main/modis-10-overvi...

"The global fire data show that Africa has more abundant burning than any other continent. MODIS observations have shown that some 70 percent of the world's fires occur in Africa. During a fairly average burning season from July through September 2006, the visualizations show a huge outbreak of savanna fires in Central Africa driven mainly by agricultural activities, but also driven by lightning strikes."

I guess the majority of these fires are caused by lightning. There are some 16 million lightning storms in the world every year[1], or about 44,000 every day. An interesting video of lightning seen from the Space Shuttle during night time orbit of Earth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6RxE-f2iyQ

The Wired video is also interesting because it shows the expanding and contracting areas of frost and vegetation.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning

Too fast. They really had to cram it into one minute? Amazingly well done, but what a pity. Would love to watch at least the YouTube 10 minute limit of this stuff, if not more.

I wonder how much co2 these "tens of millions" of fires emit vs global human energy consumption.

Net-net, probably not much. The fires represent biomass, and at best, with the oldest living trees, represent carbon sequestered 10,000 years ago. By comparison, most petroleum deposits were formed from biomass several millions of years ago. And that is the problem with fossil-fuel based carbon release: we've returned, in a matter of decades, carbon that was removed from the biosphere over millions of years.

The mean age of carbon released by forest fires is probably far lower than the 10,000 year maximum. Tree lifecycles typically range in the 100s of years, shrubs in the decades, and grasslands are perennial.

Too: following a burn, many areas see a greatly accelerated growth of flora, driven by many characteristics: minerals and nutrients liberated by the burn, greater incident sunlight, and less competition from old-growth plants.

Of course in the case of ag land clearing, much of this goes out the window.

Erm: grasses have an annual cycle. They may be "annuals" (dying each year) or perennial, but the bulk of their biomass is regenerated annually.

I get a little spooked out by any visualization that makes real life look like a somewhat more complex Minecraft.

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